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Over the last few years, autonomous vehicles have progressed very rapidly. The odometry technique that estimates displacement from consecutive sensor inputs is an essential technique for autonomous driving. In this article, we propose a fast, robust, and accurate odometry technique. The proposed technique is light detection and ranging (LiDAR)‐based direct odometry, which uses a spherical range image (SRI) that projects a three‐dimensional point cloud onto a two‐dimensional spherical image plane. Direct odometry is developed in a vision‐based method, and a fast execution speed can be expected. However, applying LiDAR data is difficult because of the sparsity. To solve this problem, we propose an SRI generation method and mathematical analysis, two key point sampling methods using SRI to increase precision and robustness, and a fast optimization method. The proposed technique was tested with the KITTI dataset and real environments. Evaluation results yielded a translation error of 0.69%, a rotation error of 0.0031°/m in the KITTI training dataset, and an execution time of 17 ms. The results demonstrated high precision comparable with state‐of‐the‐art and remarkably higher speed than conventional techniques.

An autonomous valet parking (AVP) system is designed to locate a vacant parking space and park the vehicle in which it resides on behalf of the driver, once the driver has left the vehicle. In addition, the AVP is able to direct the vehicle to a location desired by the driver when requested. In this paper, for an AVP system, we introduce technology to recognize a parking space using image sensors. The proposed technology is mainly divided into three parts. First, spatial analysis is carried out using a height map that is based on dense motion stereo. Second, modelling of road markings is conducted using a probability map with a new salient‐line feature extractor. Finally, parking space recognition is based on a Bayesian classifier. The experimental results show an execution time of up to 10 ms and a recognition rate of over 99%. Also, the performance and properties of the proposed technology were evaluated with a variety of data. Our algorithms, which are part of the proposed technology, are expected to apply to various research areas regarding autonomous vehicles, such as map generation, road marking recognition, localization, and environment recognition.

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